After reading the post "Are we in hell? Gradients vs. Black/White framing" I felt the need to add something — or rather, to describe my own view of the same question.
Free will does not exist — in any picture of the universe
This is the first and most important point. Free will exists neither in a deterministic nor in an indeterministic universe.
In a deterministic one, our decisions are fully conditioned by causal chains stretching back millions of years: genes, environment, prior brain states.
In an indeterministic one, quantum fluctuations add randomness, but randomness is not freedom. Unpredictability is not the same as autonomous choice.
From this follows a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: everyone who has ever been punished has been sentenced unjustly. Their guilt is an illusion. But their suffering is real. Our legal systems, built on ideas of retribution and personal responsibility, rest on a metaphysical foundation that does not exist.
Evolution gave us not truth, but comfort
It is often said that humans evolved to create a clear picture of the world. I would put it differently: we evolved — like any other organism — to survive and reproduce. Everything else is secondary.
To this end, nature equipped us not only with an animal fear of death, but with a set of comforting illusions. The idea that life has meaning. That suffering pays off. That everything will be "repaid." These thoughts have nothing to do with truth. They exist solely to prevent us from going mad from the horror of existence and to keep us fighting for life as if it were something valuable.
Pessimism is not another story for comfort. It is an attempt to see reality without these built-in filters. And what is revealed turns out to be far worse than any comforting story.
Some suffer far more than others
The intensity of subjective experience is catastrophically uneven.
For some, existence is a neutral background with rare spikes of discomfort. For others, it is a literal hell — not metaphorically, but concretely. There are people for whom every day is pain. There are illnesses where the slightest touch causes agony. There are mental states in which consciousness becomes its own executioner.
When people try to judge pessimism from the outside, they usually project their own relatively comfortable experience. They do not imagine what it is like to die of end-stage cancer, or to live with cluster headaches, or to be locked inside a fully paralysed body with full consciousness intact. Pessimism is not about mood. It is about soberly assessing the full spectrum of possible experience.
The intensity of suffering can be monstrous — and will become worse
Nature already permits levels of pain that exceed any possible pleasure by orders of magnitude. But soon synthetic forms of suffering will be added to this.
Even today, technologies exist that can radically distort time perception. One real hour can be stretched into subjective decades of uninterrupted agony. Or consciousness can be trapped in a temporal loop, where the same moment of pain repeats endlessly, with no possibility of exit, madness, or loss of consciousness.
This is not fiction. It is nearly reality. And our international conventions still prohibit only physical torture, completely ignoring chronoceptive violence.
Hidden suffering all around us
We are locked inside our own phenomenology. We have no direct access to another being's subjective experience. We use a plausibility principle: if a being is structurally similar to me, then it probably can suffer too.
But this principle has not always been applied. Relatively recently, it was believed that infants could not feel pain — and they were operated on without anaesthesia. Today this sounds monstrous. But what are we failing to see right now?
We admire the beauty of an autumn forest. But beneath our feet — a silent scream. Life dying from the cold. And this scream comes not only from insects and other animals. Few people know how similar the architecture of living things is at the molecular level: plants use neurotransmitters nearly identical to those found in humans — glutamate, GABA, serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine. Fungal networks generate electrical impulses resembling neural activity. Anaesthetics work on plants the same way they work on animals.
We have no grounds to claim that all of this "feels nothing." Our confidence is nothing but anthropocentric arrogance.
Cosmic hell: the mathematical approach
If an infinite multiverse exists, realising all logically possible combinations of laws and initial conditions, then among this infinite variety there must be worlds that we can confidently call hell.
Not as metaphor. As an objective state of matter.
Moreover, even within our own universe, suffering may not be an accidental deviation but a systemic property of sufficiently complex forms of material organisation. If consciousness is a lawful structural epiphenomenon of resistance to entropy, then pain may be built into the very architecture of reality.
Death may not be an exit
This is perhaps the hardest conclusion.
The pessimists of the past — Schopenhauer, Mainländer, von Hartmann — at least believed there was a way out of this nightmare. Nirvana. Collective self-extinction. The cessation of the will. Death as final non-being.
But modern physics leaves no room for non-being. Even in "empty" cosmic space, the quantum vacuum seethes — a sea of virtual particles constantly arising and vanishing. Emptiness in the strict sense is impossible. "Nothing" turns out to be a physically incoherent concept.
If the multiverse is infinite, the probability of the recurrence of any configuration of matter — including the one that generates your subjective experience — approaches unity. You disperse into atoms today. But somewhere, sometime, a similar configuration will come together again. For you, there will be no billions of years between destruction and renewed awakening. There will be only the uninterrupted "now."
Subjective death is impossible.
The final refuge of the pessimists of the past — faith in ultimate non-being — turns out to be a fiction. Death, which we revered as a liberator, is merely a temporary interruption in an endless chain of tormenting awakenings.
Black or White
Evolution — which is essentially the maintenance of homeostasis in a complex structure against the pressure of entropy — appears to operate according to the same logic everywhere. And that logic is built on a fundamental asymmetry: suffering is primary. It is suffering, not pleasure, that plays the central role in the evolutionary mechanism. Pain is the whip that drives the organism forward. Pleasure is only the temporary relief of tension, a brief pause before the next turn of the screw.
Black can exist without white, but white cannot exist without black.
I explore each of these theses in detail in a book I recently finished. It is called Perpetual Sorrow and is available for free at fracture-of-being.com.
I welcome any questions, objections, or criticism.
